robdeceased Reviews

Dead Rising: Watchtower (2015)

Could have been something special.

[5/10 · 26 November 2016]

Dead Rising is a popular zombie themed third person action/adventure franchise from Capcom. Dead Rising: Watchtower is a boring, half assed, generic c-grade zombie movie.

What is genuinely upsetting about this movie is that it could have been something special if it actually used the campy themes and over the top action of the video games, but instead it's almost paint by numbers-esque in it's execution, with only very minor details lifted from the game.

Porn parodies have more in common with the source material than this movie.

Also Rob Riggle as Frank West does not work at all and whoever wrote the character for this movie has never played the games as his attitude and lines are all kinds of wrong.

Don't bother with this one.

The Conjuring 2 (2016)

Some OK parts but gets away from itself with terrible ideas for scares.

[6/10 · 26 November 2016]

The Conjuring was a pretty dark and serious affair which always stayed pretty grounded in it's attempts to create a spooky atmosphere and keep the scares natural rather than obnoxious. The Conjuring 2 is pretty much the opposite of that during the second act.

Based on a 'true' event widely known as one of the most legitimate paranormal occurrences, C2 is set around the strange happenings to a fatherless family living in a quaint house in England. This set up is interesting at first as it starts off with poltergeist activity before graduating to full blown possession of a young girl. Before long the family enlists the help of the ghost hunter psychic lady from the first movie and her husband who, is being haunted himself by the ghost/demon taking the form of a nun with bad makeup.

Where this movie starts losing ground is around the second act, where the bigger scares are supposed to come they start to rely too much on almost cartoonish visuals instead of natural scares and 'realistic' poltergeist activity, which leaves the movie looking extremely silly in my opinion. When a movie goes from a TV switching channels on it's own to a giant spindly man straight out of 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' it kinda loses it's appeal to me.

The movie is watchable, but I wouldn't watch it again willingly as I feel there's nothing to gain from a second viewing.